For quite a long time now, Doctor Who has been one of my favorite shows on television. Ever since I first caught Christopher Eccleston’s brief tenure in a marathon on the Sci-Fi Channel (back when it actually played science fiction), I was hooked.
I was hooked when David Tennant took over the T.A.R.D.I.S., and I was hooked when Matt Smith replaced him, and when Peter Capaldi (still my personal favorite Doctor) replaced him.
And then, Jodie Whittaker took over. But more importantly, Chris Chibnall took over behind the scenes. And while I absolutely love Jodie’s Doctor, and while I absolutely loved Chibnall’s Broadchurch series, Doctor Who suddenly became a foreign concept to me. Week after week, I’d watch Jodie’s excellent Doctor dragged through piss-poor writing. Even though I’ve continued to follow the show with undying loyalty, it has become something that it wasn’t before. …
Spoilers for Discovery Season 3 ahead.
When the U.S.S. Discovery entered a wormhole to jump 950 years into the future- further than any Star Trek series or movie had ever ventured- I honestly didn’t know what to expect. For a series that began in a very familiar (and congested) time period in Trek history, this was a welcome reprieve… Star Trek, after many, many years, was finally going to explore the unknown again.
And what an exploration it was. Turns out, a lot can change in 950 years. To put this amount of time in perspective, the entirety of Star Trek prior to this season- from the earliest reaches of Enterprise to the last minutes of Star Trek: Picard (excluding a few time-travel excursions)- spanned a future period of about 250 years. That means Discovery jumped into a period of time far beyond anything we’d ever seen; the closest we’d come previously was a brief encounter with the timeship Relativity on Voyager and a couple of episodes of Enterprise that involved the time war, which gets a nice name-drop in this season of Discovery as well. …
Warner Bros. DC Extended Universe of films has, for a long time, struggled. I don’t think I need to go into details here; we all know how hit and miss their films have been.
As a fan of superhero movies, it sucks. Yeah, I love Marvel movies. But Batman and Superman are two of my favorite superheroes of all time, so it irks the hell out of me when they are pulled through shoddy storytelling (ahem, Justice League).
There have been, of course, some shining lights in the DC darkness. The upcoming Snyder Cut looks promising (or at least, better), and though it bombed horribly in the box office, Birds of Prey was actually one of their best efforts. …
Ok, yes, I know that the MacBook Air is not a Chromebook. You know how I know this? Well, because I wrote half of this story on a Chromebook.
(Yes, that does mean the other half was written on the MacBook Air… and I’m not telling you which half)
I’m writing this as I switch back and forth between the M1 MacBook Air and Google’s Pixelbook Go. And as I do so, I can’t help but notice some similarities. And if you’re familiar with my tech articles of late, you’ll know that means I’m itching to compare the two computers.
Ok. I know what you’re thinking. Haven’t I compared Apple’s MacBook Air and Google’s Pixelbook Go to death? Haven’t I explored everything there is to possibly explore between these two computers? …
Recently, I had to send my iPhone 12 mini back due to a faulty camera; while I’m waiting for a replacement to arrive (or rather, deciding whether or not to even order a replacement), I’ve been using Google’s Pixel 4a 5G.
Now, Apple is well-known for their ecosystem, how excellently their products work in unison. On their own, Apple devices are fantastic, but when you start pairing them together, you get something akin to magic.
And for a good part of 2020, I was contently living entirely in that ecosystem; I had the iPhone, the iPad, the MacBook, the AirPods, the Apple Watch, etc. and so forth. So you can imagine the disruption I experienced when suddenly I had to swap out what is arguably the hub of Apple’s ecosystem- the iPhone- for a lowly Android device. …
A few weeks ago, I wrote about an experience I was having with my new M1 MacBook Air- that story was called “My M1 MacBook Air Has Developed a Fault”.
Long story short (too late), my brand new, state-of-the-art MacBook was warning me that my battery needed servicing. I had to send it back to Apple and get a replacement, and to this day I still do not know if there was actually a problem with the battery itself or if Big Sur was just miscommunicating.
I thought that would be the end of my Apple troubles. After all, Apple products have always been very reliable, at least for me. I’ve never had to take an Apple product in for servicing, I’ve never had to even take one to the Genius Bar to have them tell me what I was doing wrong. Ok, once I had to take a pair of AirPods back because they weren’t connecting properly. But that was one product in the many dozens of Apple devices I’ve ever owned. …
When Disney announced way back in 2012 that they were buying Lucasfilm, all I cared about was that we were getting new Star Wars. After all, the original trilogy was classic, and the prequels… well… they left something to be desired.
Don’t get me wrong; I still enjoy the prequels (at least two of them, anyway). And the prequels brought some of my favorite aspects of the galaxy far, far away, like seeing how the galaxy fell to Emperor Palpatine and what exactly the Clone Wars were (and also, The Clone Wars animated series). But it was difficult to see one of my favorite franchises go out with more of a whimper and not a bang (it wasn’t uncommon, though; Star Trek similarly ended with a lackluster film in 2002 until it was finally brought back in 2009 by the same director who would help usher in the sequel-era of Star Wars…man, the early 2000’s were not good for major science fiction franchises). …
I can finally, finally review Christopher Nolan’s Tenet.
Look, I’ve wanted to see this movie for a long time. Ever since I saw the first trailer, saw cars flipping backwards and that masked soldier crawling backwards on the ground, I knew I needed to see it.
But then COVID happened, and theaters shut down. Everything got delayed. You live on Earth; you know what’s going on.
In August, when Tenet finally hit theaters, I wrote about how I wasn’t planning on going to see it; this had nothing to do with the quality of the movie or my desires to see it- as I said, I’ve been waiting to see this one- but I just didn’t feel like I could safely sit in a theater for 2–3 hours to watch a movie. …
In 2020, I’m sure a lot of people have found happiness hard to come by. Even if we don’t realize it, even if we don’t think we aren’t happy, I think there’s a part of all of us that realizes we aren’t as happy as we would like to be.
With the pandemic and the quarantines and the staggering loss of life and of jobs, there’s a shadow hanging over a lot of our happiness. With the riots and racial injustices that continue to plague our country, there’s a shadow hanging over our happiness. …
So, SPOILERS, but we are getting the Spider-Verse on the big screen. Ok, I know we’ve already gotten the Spider-Verse featured in the aptly named Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which was an excellent, excellent film.
But now we’re getting the Spider-Verse- or at least some version of a multiverse- in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And Tom Holland’s Spider-Man is slap-bang in the middle of it.